Bill Tilden Biography - Born Into Privilege, Chronology, A Self-taught Genius, Awards And Accomplishments, The Tilden Age

tennis player players professional

1893-1953

American tennis player

Bill Tilden has been called the greatest men's single players of all time, a player's player whose cannon of a serve, psychological know-how, paralyzing drop shot, and canny backcourt play transformed the game of tennis. Tilden's dazzling eighteen-year career as an amateur took him to three Wimbledon titles and seven U.S. singles championships. Dominating the game from 1920

Bill Tilden

to 1926 and capturing 13 successive Davis Cup singles matches against the top players in the world, Tilden became the first celebrity tennis player, every bit as well-known as baseball's Babe Ruth or boxing's Jack Dempsey. Unlike modern players who are past their prime by their late 20s, Tilden had a career that spanned decades. After retiring from amateur tennis in 1930, he went on to participate in the fledgling professional tour, helping to establish the legitimacy of for-pay tennis. He played into his fifties, winning his last title—the Pro doubles—in 1945. In addition to his performance on the court, Tilden also penned over a dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction, on tennis, and was an aspiring actor. However, the success he found in his professional life was not duplicated in his private life. A homosexual in a time when such an orientation was kept firmly in the closet, Tilden was twice convicted of having sex with minors and died at the age of 60, penniless and alone, scrounging money from friends to buy racquets and balls to give lessons or to drive to the next professional exhibition match.

Sketch by J. Sydney Jones

Additional Topics

William Tatem Tilden, Jr., was born on February 10, 1893, at the family mansion, Overleigh, in the wealthy Germantown section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The home, a Tudor-like structure on McKean Street, was symbolic in two regards: it demonstrated the Tilden wealth and lineage, and its location, less than three football fields distant from the gates of the local tennis club, the German-town C…

Tilden, at over six feet tall, trim with long legs and wide shoulders, had the perfect tennis build. He moved quickly and gracefully, had a powerful forehand, a strong serve, and a slicing backhand. Tilden was also able to mix it up on the court, slicing and dicing, and adapting his play to that of his opponents. He was ranked for the first time in 1915, in the top 70. By the summer of 1916 he had…

Tilden continued his dominance in world tennis in 1921, successfully defending his Wimbledon and U.S. singles titles. At Wimbledon that year he beat a South African newcomer, Brian "Babe" Norton, in what many viewers have termed the strangest match in Wimbledon history. Exhausted from previous play and suffering from boils, Tilden had to get out of his sickbed for the Norton match. D…

Known as "Big Bill" and "Little Bill," Tilden and Johnston were the two greatest stars in American men's tennis during the 1920s. Together the terror twins were able to successively defeat the French, Australians, British, and Japanese in Davis Cup matches from 1920 to 1926, creating a sevenyear stretch of American dominance in those competitions. But the two wer…

Tilden continued his string of victories until the fateful year of 1926 when, in a match with the Frenchman Rene Lacoste, part of the famed French Musketeers, he injured the cartilage in his knee and lost his first Davis Cup match. Later that summer he was defeated in the quarterfinals at Forest Hills by Henri Cochet, another member of the French Musketeers who had been gunning for him for years. …

Bill Tilden changed the sport of tennis forever. Not only did he revolutionize the game with his emphasis on variety of stroke production, but also with his reliance on a sort of inner tennis, in which psychology was an acknowledged on-court partner. "No man ever bestrode sports as Tilden did during [1920 to 1930]," wrote Deford in Sports Illustrated. "It was not just that he …

Tilden was sixty when he died and it is only about a year since he played in the professional championship, where he defeated Wayne Sabin and played a close match with Frank Kovacs. This represents a period of thirty-five years of continuous championship play in a game as strenuous as any. And at fifty-nine Tilden still was the world's finest tennis player over the short span of one set…

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